make a solo strike for the summit, racing the
weather. If the outlook was good, there would
be a team ascent. At eight o'clock that night, a
red rocket flared.
Reinhold set out in the darkness of the early
morning with no equipment save crampons
and an ice ax, while Gunther and Baur began
to prepare ropes in the first 200 meters of the
couloir, to aid in the difficult descent. Until this
moment, Gunther had been with Reinhold
every step of the way; now his elder brother
always the leader, always used to getting his
way-was en route to the summit and glory,
while he was left to handle a tangled mess of
frozen rope. Something inside him snapped,
and, dropping the ropes, he sprinted after his
brother. In four hours, Gunther covered the
600 vertical meters of the Merkl Icefield. "Sure
ly," as Reinhold said, "he went at the limit of
his possibilities to catch me."
The effects of Ginther's extraordinary effort
were soon apparent. It was five p.m., late in the
day, when the brothers shook hands on the sum
mit. An hour later-a long time-they began
the descent. Sluggish and weakening, Gunther
balked at the difficult route they had ascended.
Alarmed, Reinhold sought a quicker route to
lower ground, leading them west of the summit
ridge where, when darkness caught them, they
huddled down for what would be the worst
night of their lives. Under the hard, bright stars,
the night temperature plunged to 40 degrees
below zero. Without a tent, their only protec
tion was a single space blanket. They had no
food or water and had been many hours in the
"death zone." Gunther began to hallucinate, paw
ing at an imaginary blanket on the ground.
"This is very hard," Reinhold said. "In high
altitude, there's no oxygen going to the blood,
so you cannot burn, you are not heated. Instinc
tively, you stay awake as long as possible. You
force yourself that the blood is circulating, by
thinking. We told also each other, 'Move the toes,
don't sleep.'... If somebody would sleep, really
sleep, it could easily be that he's passing by."
By daylight, Ginther's condition was critical.
Then suddenly, it seemed help was on the way.
Below their bivouac site, the figures of Peter
Scholtz and Felix Kuen appeared coming from
Camp Four, laboring up the ascent route on
the trail the brothers had broken. The ensuing
miscommunication between the two parties,
shouting back and forth across a divide roughly
the length of a football field, remains one of the
most unsatisfactorily explained incidents of the
Nanga Parbat saga. Scholtz and Kuen are now
dead, so their accounts cannot be subjected to
inquiry. Somehow, the ascending climbers failed
to comprehend the crisis. For their part, the
Messners could not know that the red rocket for
bad weather had been fired in error. The weather
was in fact flawless, and Scholtz and Kuen had
come for the summit, not for rescue.
Bypassed by his companions, Reinhold made
a bold decision: He and Gunther would descend
by way of the Diamir Face, on the opposite side
of the mountain. "When you are standing there
up high, close to the summit, if you look to the
Diamir side, it's a very gentle snow slope," said
Steve House, an American who climbed the
Rupal Face, alpine-style, with his partner, Vince
Anderson, in 2005. "It's almost flat; it's easy walk
ing," he said of the initial descent. "The Rupal
Face is huge, dangerous, scary. It makes perfect
sense to me why he followed that decision."
The Diamir Face had been climbed only twice
before, and Reinhold was navigating by instinct.
In the night, he and Gunther made a second, brief
bivouac at 6,500 meters. The next day, under a
punishing sun, they continued downward. By
6,000 meters, Gunther had partly recovered, and
it seemed they were on the homestretch. "From
the second bivouac, we could see more or less that
there is a way down," Reinhold said. "You can
overview a mountain from down, from a certain
distance, but never from upwards, and this is very
important to understand.... Coming from up,
you see only abyss; you cannot know, 'I go right,
or left'-and this was also the reason why I was
forced on the way down to go ahead."
By his own assessment, Reinhold was at times
over an hour ahead, out of sight and hearing.
Although speed has always been his trade
mark, he may not yet have understood that his
REINHOLD MESSNER 55